


Moribund

by GoldenThreads



Series: Moribund [1]
Category: New Mutants, X-Men (Comicverse)
Genre: Character Study, Mental Health Issues, Missing Scene, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-28
Updated: 2013-09-28
Packaged: 2017-12-27 20:36:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 8,199
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/983325
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GoldenThreads/pseuds/GoldenThreads
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Doug Ramsey is alive. Alive is complicated. In the aftermath of Necrosha, the New Mutants all have their ghosts to deal with.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> After Necrosha, we never really see just how the heck Doug was reintegrated back into the team, let alone how he started trying to piece all his former friendships back together while emotionally numb and pretty thoroughly traumatized. Seeing as I already think about this way too much, I figured I'd give it a shot.
> 
> Everything takes place 2-3 days after Amara and Doug's reconciliation in issue 9.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Warlock pays one last visit to tie up a loose end.

2.8% Operating Capacity. Not enough to make it back to Utopia by daybreak; not enough to make it back at all unless he stopped to replenish his lifeglow. He’d do his best. For now he drifted along on the wings of his owlform to conserve energy, swooping down over the grounds he once knew so well, setting the squirrels below scurrying for cover as he wheeled along the tree line.

He lit on a dead branch on the outskirts of the forest and paused to gaze out at his first refuge. Although the ruins of the Xavier Institute had not changed since his last visit a few days earlier, nothing was the same. Not even nostalgia could tempt him to glance at his mindbank; he hadn’t the time, his errand too dire for delay. He flew on.

When he was young, those halcyon days seemed to stretch on forever. Naivete was a gift.

At home—his new home, with luck, with hope—an even greater gift awaited him. He had to be quick.

The graveyard too was barren. Rarely patrolled, he supposed, if no one had noticed the broken earth of that grave gaping with too many empty promises. A week ago it had filled him with a singular dread, but now it only stirred a tumult of anxious emotion within him. So many queries, so few facts.

As he dropped to the ground his feet curled themselves into not-so-long forgotten boots, the rest of the old team uniform wrapping his torso in blue and gold. He reached a hand to the swoop of his hair, circuits on circuits. It had been so long since he wore that face like a second home. _In honor of his sacrifice_ —if only Douglock had known.

He didn’t have the energy to maintain that form, but he did so anyway, held on long enough to kneel in the grass and shovel handful after handful of earth back into the open grave. He couldn’t leave the ground disturbed, let alone allow anyone else to see it in such a state. This would be his last visit and he needed to make it count.

It was not a matter of coming full circle; there was no hope of that.

He hid pieces of himself in that familiar coffin and shed Douglock as a distant memory. It wasn’t right to keep living for both of them, not when Doug could and _should_ live for himself. It wasn’t right. So he buried him down, boxed up the scripts and secreted them away where he could pretend to forget. He was a memory-keeper, and now that he had returned them to their rightful owner he had no right to hoard the backups, that monstrosity he forged from their broken pieces.

Warlock stood at last, a guilty trespasser. The ground was uneven, but perhaps the grass would grow back swiftly enough that no one would notice. Mission accomplished, ghosts locked in their closets.

He had tried everything to be human. Let the effort end with a secret and an empty grave.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The team attempts to settle on a plan of action.

The mess hall held a few less faces than Sam hoped to find. “Anyone seen Warlock this morning?”

Dani gave him a wave in greeting, then held up a halting finger as she steeled herself for a sip of coffee. Every cup was more tinny and terrible than the last — yet another ritual of mutant solidarity through mutual suffering. At least it woke her up. “He told me he was leaving last night, said he’d be back sometime today. Some errand he had to do by himself.”

“Maybe even ‘Lock’s spooked by our zombie’s ghastly gaze,” Roberto joked, wiggling his fingers in a spooky gesture. “I’m just saying, it’s nothing the rest of you don’t see.”

“He’s…adjusting. You spend a decade in the ground and see how you feel, Bobby.” The words came out feebler than Shan intended, but she stood by them. Even she hadn’t quite shaken off that frenzied confusion she'd felt at the cold, empty heart of him.

“I’d come out as devilishly handsome as ever.”

His protest met with a round of rolled eyes.

“Did anyone invite ‘im to breakfast?” Sam asked, then winced at the uncomfortable pause that followed. “Yeah, we ain’t so good at this either.”

“We have to talk about it sometime,” Dani said firmly. “It’s still sinking in for me too, but ignoring it will only make things more difficult in the long run.”

Shan pushed her empty tray to the side and leaned forward towards the others, lowering her voice just slightly. “Illyana isn’t here. Now might be the best time.”

Everything had been shaky at best since the team’s official formation a few weeks prior, but they’d found their center and it held strong as ever. Even though they all knew to keep a close watch on Illyana, somehow they still trusted each other with absolute certainty. But keeping an eye on _three_ teammates was something else entirely.

Rubbing at his neck, Sam asked, “Hell, where do we even start?”

“The Doug situation,” said Dani. “Has anyone really talked to him? Figured out where he stands? Amara, you and him reached some sort of understanding—what did he tell you?”

Thus far Amara hadn’t said a word. Normally a morning person of vigor and cheer, she sat with her arms crossed on the tabletop, lips a thin and thoughtful line, her food untouched. She raised her head and gazed steadily at the rest of the team. “I can assure you it’s really him, but I don’t know what else you’d like me to say. That should be all that matters.”

“It is, it is,” Dani assured her. “Just…”

“Just what?”

“Just _look_ at him,” Roberto cut in. He gestured vaguely to his face and torso, and they all knew exactly what he meant. “That’s not the kid we buried. Transmode or whatever, it’s weird as hell.”

“’Berto has a point. He might look the same age as us now, but that doesn’t mean we should treat him as an adult. He’s probably still—what, fifteen? Sixteen?” The coffee used to be a grim reward for waking up, yet now it felt like a strange form of penance. Dani downed another sip in preparation; someone had to say it. “Should he really be in the field?”

Sam groaned, but he thought had occurred to him as well. “That’ll go over well.”

“I think it’s more complicated than that,” said Shan. “When I was in his head, he…he doesn’t strike me as a child anymore, and it isn’t the somber face. Did anyone figure out exactly what they did to him? Or what Warlock did, for that matter?”

“Rebooted him or something, yeah?” offered Roberto.

“And do we know exactly _anything_ about Warlock right now?” she continued.

“Man, if we’re even questioning ‘Lock…”

“I can’t say his timing inspires much confidence,” Sam added. Warlock turning up within _minutes_ of Doug’s sudden appearance was eerie in a way that had nagged at him for days. He kept turning it over in his head, though his heart ached with guilt over distrusting their old friend yet again, and his gut said it couldn’t have gone any other way.

“And we have no idea where he’s been all these years! The only one who might know is…” Dani was quickly running out of coffee, but this time her emotions were a lot more complicated than mere penance.

“I tried to call her,” Shan said. “The number’s disconnected. Even Madrox didn’t have her new one.”

They lapsed back into awkward quiet. There wasn’t exactly protocol for this sort of thing; they’d checked.

Dani looked down at her cup and swirled the dregs around and around as she thought. If they were too weary to invent new options, the obvious ones were probably best. “We could always ask them directly.”

Roberto smacked a hand against the side of his face. “Because that went over sooo well with Illyana.”

“Clearing the air is a good idea,” Dani argued, eyes narrowed. “How are we supposed to trust him if—”

“You will not ask him.”

Amara’s sudden fury cut through and silenced the table at once. The ground did not shake, her eyes did not flare, and no tremble marred her poise, yet the air grew heavy with a sweltering heat.

“Don’t you dare,” she continued, voice quaking dangerously. “You know damn well what’s wrong with him, and you will give him time to deal with it on his own.”

Sam reached out a steadying hand. “’Mara, we didn’t mean—”

“You owe him that much,” she snapped. Amara rose from her seat, then took a deep breath to reign herself in. “And yes, for the record, _I am fine_.” And with that, she grabbed her tray and left.

The room took a long time to cool.

“…What just happened?” Roberto asked. His voice was laced with far more concern than confusion, and only knowledge of Amara’s certain disdain kept him from chasing after her.

Dani ran her thumb along the rim of her empty cup, reevaluating their options. “Remember how I kept hounding her for updates after she came out of her coma? She didn’t exactly appreciate it.”

“You weren’t the only one,” Shan added quietly.

Sam’s face fell. “Aw, hell. I’d forgotten about that.”

For better or worse, they didn’t talk about old wounds. They forgot all but their own scars.

They’d all had their brushes with death, that was part and parcel of being a mutant. You kept breathing as best you could, stood up every time you fell, and never stopped moving forward. You dragged your friends along if they couldn’t run on their own. Utopia would sink beneath the combined weight of mutant misfortune of they froze up and looked back for a moment too long—Selene had been counting on exactly that.

Doug Ramsey was a wound they all shared the same, but years on it had festered and scarred in different ways for each of them. Although the New Mutants flouted that rule about not looking back more than anyone else, for years it kept them away from that dreaded little lock-box of grief kept buried under all the rest of their childhood memories. Even now they couldn’t quite bring themselves to talk about it; they took the new status quo and pretended everything was fine because it _had_ to be. Open the box and who knew what they’d find. What he’d read.

It wasn’t their fault.

“All in favor of following Amara’s lead on this one?” Dani asked at last. She was good at looking out for people, at helping them stand and patching them up along the way, but this time she had to admit her methods might not do much good.

Shan glanced at her in tacit agreement and Sam lent his approval with a nod.

“For Warlock’s sake,” Roberto said at length. He didn’t like that new Doug one bit—he’d hardly liked the old one—but they all knew Warlock was never quite right again without him, and Roberto still felt a distant inkling of guilt about that.

“Back to the wait-and-see approach,” Sam sighed.

“Nah.” Dani tidied up her breakfast tray, left that much loathed cup in one corner, then looked up and grinned at her teammates. They’d be fine. “Same old, same old. New Mutants look after their own.”

 


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Utopia's newest resident conducts an investigation and finds himself investigated in turn.

Each day they _requested_ his presence in Med-Bay, as though Doug had any choice, let alone anything to choose. They did not trust him; they trusted his virus even less. No one voiced this concern but their every veiled, clinical glance spoke loudly enough. He offered himself as a puzzle to be solved and stood there puzzling them out in turn.

Dr. Rao ran the tests now, more and more each day. She hoped to pinpoint the infection and eliminate it entirely. The attempt was pointless, but he didn’t bother telling her—he didn’t bother saying a lot of things. His observations drew displeasure, annoyance. She wouldn’t have listened anyway; he could tell the word _impossible_ had never dictated a day of her life.

The virus listened to him. It was nice to have something that did.

Dr. Bradley had already lost interest, not so much pacified by Doug’s vague explanations as waylaid by the thrill of more impenetrable mysteries. Mr. Jeffries hovered, eager to collaborate on something the higher-ups had not yet given permission for. There was an unspoken assumption that Doug would join the technical operation teams; he was too useful to be kept idle for long. The alien AI who introduced herself as Danged did not show her face again, but he had deduced the etymology of her name in an instant. She likely observed from afar.

Learning their names was important. His old world seemed small and wholly discernible in comparison to the new. Now he played the tactician surveying a foreign land and charting connections on an empty map, the picture extending far past the parchment’s edge. For all his clarity he was trapped writing question marks instead of certainties. Queries and clues: something to focus on, something to do besides sit in his room and stare at the ceiling.

A map of Utopia was concrete, finite, achievable. Plot the fortress before cataloging the soldiers in the barracks. The architecture droned on about war and isolation, and he followed each hint of meaning onward to corridors abandoned and noisy, filling in the gaps of his knowledge. He kept his eyes open even when there was nothing new to read.

Absences unremarked, voids in the stories that wove around him: Here Be Dragons. Jean Grey, Hank McCoy, Kitty Pryde.

Rahne.

Doug recognized few faces, yet everyone appeared to recognize him. Gossip, he supposed. His presence disturbed them—so many dead friends rose to haunt them and he alone remained. He was not the one they wanted. Misplaced survivor’s guilt though it was, he could not blame them. Most were only children, a handful younger than he had been, and steel glinted in their eyes no matter how carefree their smiles. Kids raised in a war zone.

Passing by the scarcely populated classrooms, he spotted a group of students chatting among themselves. Pity in the dark eyes of the girl with the cicada wings. [Poor kid.] Wariness in the boy with the green scales, flexing his arm in a subconscious display of warning. [Something’s wrong with that guy.] The silver-skinner girl smiled, wondered if she should say hello. [Would that be weird?] A flash of a bitter scowl on another. Crossed arms, fists tucked against sides. [It isn’t fair.]

Doug strolled past. The hallway was crowded.

[You are unwelcome here.]

[You frighten me.]

[I don’t know who you are.]

[Why was it you?]

**[You frighten me.]**

Horror movies. Sometimes people came back.

Sometimes they came back wrong.

He spotted Illyana turning the corner and watched her draw similar reactions from passersby — more distrust from the adults, more disgust from the children.

“We are ghosts,” she said before he could ask, meaning encrypted in stories unshared, tomes locked up tight. She kept walking.

[We are nothing alike.]

Doug could not be sure which of them was avoiding the other.

He returned to his room, exhausted.

Someone waiting outside his door. One of the other mutants, trapped at that difficult age that defied classification as either student or adult: the outfit of the former, the weight of the latter.

“Hey, Dani asked me to, uh—here.” The young man held out a personal computer, sleeker than anything could’ve been years earlier. He forced a hopeful, friendly smile, yet the look behind those red glasses proved he realized just how feeble the offer.

Pure information would do little to fill the gulf within him. Still, it wasn’t quite pity, and rejecting Dani’s gesture could further jeopardize his standing with the team. Doug accepted the gift and nodded his thanks.

He remembered too late to ask for the other mutant’s name.

Technology had advanced rapidly in his absence, but the language was an old friend, one actually eager to see him. Sitting on the floor with the computer in his lap, Doug let his fingers fall into their customary positions along the lighter, slimmer keys. It only took him a few minutes to readjust to the system, a few more spent investigating various specs. Though Kitty had always known better, even he could appreciate the astonishing leap in processing power.

The desktop held only one shortcut placed in the very center and titled most forcefully.

READ THIS FIRST — M-DAY

Doug opened the mutant database instead, not quite ready to start on a decade’s worth of history until after he had finished organizing the present into a more stable framework. His teammates’ files on the list of active X-Men gave him pause, but he did not open them. He refused to pry. Past friendship gave him no right, no claim to their last decade—no truth sat more heavily within him than this. Curiosity alone remained under his control.

His own file was riddled with empty entries, linked to Warlock’s and marked for immediate revision. Doug didn’t have any answers to give them. He scrolled on.

Rahne was alive. His eyes caught on her image, and he hissed out a breath he didn’t know he held. Older now, strength and experience woven into every micro-expression he could trace, but her eyes still so warm. He didn’t need her beside him; he needed her safe. Safe was enough.

Only one other name could bring him any measure of peace.

It brought none.

Doug shut down the computer and set it on his otherwise barren desk. Undecorated white walls, a closet with two dozen vacant hangers, desk and drawer with useless shelves — the room’s metaphoric readings were not lost on him. A mirror, too, had adorned the wall, but on the first night he had taken it down and stashed it in the closet, unwilling to stare at that unfamiliar face any longer. He had laid in bed trailing his fingertips over those three shallow little nicks in his side, echos of a wound that never could have healed, the only proof he had of continuity.

This time he sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the wall instead, the meaningless irregularities of the dried paint providing a sufficient mental canvas for him to organize the day’s signs, linking broader networks of meaning and building interfaces to help him focus.

His own heartbeat was so very loud.

Misplaced survivor’s guilt.

 


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Amara takes matters into her own hands.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm fascinated by the fact that Amara of all people was the first one to really welcome Doug back, especially the hows and whys of her extending that trust. For all the team's shared and separate miseries, she's been in very different places than the rest of them, and those wounds align a little too well with that dour linguist of theirs.
> 
> Copious Latin notes at the bottom.

Doug offered Amara an apology in a language he called her own, but this was only a half-truth.

It didn’t matter how blindingly honest the whispered words, nor how they struck chords of emotion his frozen expression could not. All that mattered was that these were _their_ words, a perfected variant of the blended dialect they made as children, when he was the only one eager to speak Latin with her, the one who listened with rapt attention when she recited the works of beloved classical poets, the one who brought her copies of the later masterpieces Nova Roma had missed.

He spoke to her in the language of weekend trips to town, where the simplest of misunderstandings would cut her to the bone—she was no barbarian, she was a daughter of a far more glorious nation!—but no matter how childish and entitled her ranting, he wouldn’t laugh, not ever. The language they cobbled together from old words and lost words, Incan words and English words, words he found in the strangest books, words she heard that made her smile, words that made her think this was almost enough.

They were never particularly close. Amara wasn’t there when Doug died, and the funeral passed before news reached her. She didn’t even remember grieving, only that words she always took for granted turned to ashes in her throat.

In May she would leave flour cakes on her windowsill lest he wander restless and unmourned.

Whatever nameless thing his death carved from her, now he had given it back. Amara swore to offer him the very same—to do better than flour cakes this time.

Amara hadn’t been cleared for combat yet, so when the rest of the team headed off to an evening training session in the Danger Room, she found herself rapping on Doug’s door instead. They’d housed him in a quiet corner of Utopia away from the others, a place where he wouldn’t be overwhelmed by his peers and would have plenty of time to think, to find his feet again. A horrible decision, in her opinion. Well-meaning, but irredeemably isolating. As if the quiet in his own head wouldn’t be devastating enough.

When the door opened, she smiled hopefully and asked, “Dinner in San Francisco?”

Doug watched her with immense caution, expecting some new forced attempt at pity, and she kept her eyes fixed on his as he evaluated her intentions. The slightest shade of pretense would have undermined everything, so Amara faced him with an open-hearted clarity even she had never expected of herself. She was not the same girl of long ago.

“Yes, it would be my pleasure,” he answered at last.

“Fantastic.” Amara sighed with relief, less from delight at his company than at the promise of a real meal. “They try, but the food here is terrible. And the coffee, you…really shouldn’t try the coffee.”

“So noted,” Doug said, glancing back into his room. It wasn’t as though he owned anything but the clothes on his back, his own newly fitted set of the team outfit, but Amara had planned ahead and worn her own uniform as well. They made quite the obnoxiously yellow pair.

He followed her down the hall and let her fill the silence with warm, simple words.

 

* * *

 

 

It was distinctly bizarre to consider this his first venture into a city. The lights, the noise, the endless commotion, all of those expected consistencies superimposed upon a patchwork of the new and unfamiliar—slang, fashion, social norms. His eyes skittered along the crowd as hundreds of minutiae vied for his attention, and he paused to appreciate each in turn. The selfishness of an ill-parked car, the delicate curl of a tattoo along the nape of a stranger’s neck, the plethora of purposefully elitist coffee shops, the distinct definition of every length of shirt, of skirt, of boot and heel. So, so many headphones. Every deviation from the norm demanding consideration. The study of a language created the language itself: self-defined systems, inexhaustible possibilities.

This was not Utopia, cold and forbidding despite the prayer of its name. San Francisco sang and Doug hung on her every note, let her serenade twist and twirl through his head.

A tug at his sleeve.

Doug glanced over at Amara, traced the curve of her complacent smile. Ah. He wandered off again. He opened his mouth to apologize, but she shook her head and pulled him over to a nearby bench where they could sit and watch the crowd. Or rather, where he could watch she could rest assured he wouldn’t stray into traffic.

“Remember to blink,” she reminded him. He tried, but forgot soon enough. Too much to read.

With her feet flat against the ground, it was easy for Amara to lose herself listening to the city’s other song, the thrum of the earth, the subway’s thunder and the rain of countless footfalls. She wondered what he saw, what he thought of the future they forged. The little differences escaped her, changes dragged out through the years, but she doubted there was a single detail he could miss now.

Everything looked the same to her. Already tired of sitting around, Amara turned to the easy distraction of her phone, full of texts from the team wondering why she hadn’t turned up for dinner. She ignored Roberto’s, sent Sam a quick update, and told Dani not to worry. When she looked up again at last, she found Doug studying her instead of the crowd, reading who knew what in that quick tap of her thumbs on the screen.

This was one of those not-so-tiny differences. Amara passed over the phone and watched Doug fiddle with it, noting how he avoided all her messages and call logs in favor of the other capabilities. “I’ll bribe Bobby to get you a nice one,” she offered, pleased by his spark of curiosity. She’d bribe Roberto to get the _best_ one — a set of fancy new phones for the entire team, maybe.

Doug gave a noncommittal hum as he passed it back to her. “Thank you. I am ready for dinner now, if you are.” Her stomach had growled a few minutes ago.

They ended up at a fancy little Italian place where Amara had reserved an outside table overlooking the bay. She ordered for both of them while Doug inspected the new surroundings, cataloging languages of business and marketing and work-weary waiters.

Quiet reigned in that part of town. “You expected the city to cause me sensory overload,” he observed.

“Just in case,” said Amara. [I don’t want you to be uncomfortable.]

“You need not concern yourself. The stimuli are not overwhelming, merely—enthralling.” Perhaps everything would fade to background noise eventually, but the idea of true silence unnerved him. Silence was far too similar to _Off_. Stillness was even worse. Still, the quiet wasn’t so bad with company.

“I noticed.” Her smile turned wry, indulgent. [I didn’t mind.]

Doug looked away. Eye contact was only proper, but if he could read her every fleeting micro-expression, did that make it akin to eavesdropping and therefore impolite? He knew how much she loathed telepaths, and he had wronged her enough that week already. Conflicted, he stared down at his napkin until the waiter brought their meals.

They ate in silence, both picking at their food. Doug wasn’t hungry. The waiter kept shooting him a nasty look, so he dutifully rearranged the food on his plate until it appeared well sampled, but otherwise there wasn’t much to be done. Amara had stopped halfway through her own meal, and he looked to her for his next cue.

[I don’t know how to say this.] Something discomforted Amara intensely, but it was the _topic_ that daunted her, not Doug himself. An important distinction. He still wondered at the speed of her turnabout, from deep suspicion to open acceptance in under ten minutes, all with only a few lyric lines of Latin. It wasn’t forced loyalty either, not the way the others constantly reminded themselves to be welcoming. She was simply warm.

He didn’t deserve it.

“The waiter is attracted to you,” Doug said, attempting to establish a pretense of small talk. All he had to go on were observations; if he could read nothing of interest to her, their conversation was doomed. “He believes we are on a date. A dissatisfying one.”

The corner of her mouth twitched. “Believe me, I’ve had way worse.”

“Sorry.” Doug wasn’t sure what he was apologizing for. He could read the atmosphere, but it was neither comfortable nor uncomfortable, parentheses with nothing set between.

“The years were hell, Douglas,” she said at last. “I don’t want you to think we’ve been some big happy family the whole time. We only just started finding our way back together, and…here you are.” _Gods be praised_ , Amara added to herself. There could be few greater auguries than that.

She ran a hand through her hair, attempting to distract herself, then abruptly switched to Latin. “I never do this sort of thing—talk about myself. But I know what it is like to be missing years, to think you have no home to go back to, to look at old friends and decide things will never be the same so there’s no point in trying.”

Her words circled round, bordering on oratory; she had rehearsed this.

“I have been there too, and even if it’s not nearly the same, I thought... I want to tell you about what you missed. So when you look at me and read whatever it is you read, it’ll be because you know me, not because of your powers. Okay?”

_What you missed_. Doug caught her parallel, the echo of how he once fumbled and offered her a worn copy of Virgil’s Aeneid, trying so desperately not to offend— _I think you missed this._ No blame, no secrecy, no bargaining. Amara simply traded on the past the same way he had done to convince her of his good will. It wasn’t nostalgia; it was a language he never lost.

“All right.”

Amara smiled and began.

She offered him sparse pieces, each key selected with utmost care so he would intuit what she was too proud to say. The fall of Nova Roma was more than a loss of home [you are not the only thing come from the grave, you have brought my language back to me], the dream of Alison Crestmere more than a loss of self [even bridges burned can be rebuilt], her death and rebirth so much more than some petty metaphor. She did not hesitate to show him her hands, the scars so faint. [I cannot understand your loss, but I think you will understand mine.]

It destroyed him to have ever hurt her, but she knew, she knew.

Running—she did not use that word, yet he could see slivers of shame in her diction—because she could not ask for help. [I didn’t think I had anyone left to ask.] Running until she found herself with a sword in her hand and solid earth beneath her feet — strength enough to start again, to build anew. Her eyes lit up when she spoke of fighting with a gladius once more, and that excited glimmer dimmed to fondness at mention of her teaching position, duties she never wanted but embraced in the end. Duties that ended. M-Day.

He should have read the file.

“Amara.”

She stopped and looked up. Doug had listened in silence with that intense, unchanging expression all the while, but now she noted the slightest hint of a crease on his brow. The first glimpse of real emotion she’d seen on his face so far. “Quid…?

“Num Aquilae lacrimantur?”

Amara swiped a hand over her cheeks, thankfully dry, but her eyes were wet enough that it was a near thing. She almost protested aloud, but Doug wouldn’t have phrased the question that way unless he understood her predicament. Still, she switched back to English to avoid sullying the language of her gods with excuses.

“No one talks about that day,” she explained darkly as she rubbed at her eyes. She hadn’t even mentioned her lost lover’s name aloud, but still that burning despair scorched her heart as fierce as ever.

“For good reason,” Doug said. He would follow her into any language she pleased. “Your intent is admirable, Amara, but please do not feel obligated to—”

She laughed sharply, the sound tinged with an unexpected bitterness, closer to offended than amused. “ _Obligated?_ Good to know even you can still misunderstand.”

Amara had never done anything halfway in her life and certainly wasn’t about to start now.

The rest of the tale rushed by, conflict after conflict blending into one constant war. Utopia being a military fortress indeed, but Doug saw now the crucial difference distinguishing it from the protective camp that came before. Not quite a prison.

“It isn’t done yet,” Amara told him. “But the dream is…good enough.” [I think we have forgotten how to want more.]

“Yet you miss the earth beneath your feet.” A man-made island would frustrate her abilities considerably.

“Why do you think we’re here now?” She grinned and worried at her bottom lip. [I am not embarrassed of this, but no one else understands.] “I know Utopia doesn’t live up to its name. But when we resettled here, this time I fetched my _Penates_ and brought them with. For luck.”

“You…crossed the sea with them?”

“Don’t you dare,” she warned, but her eyes shone at the reference. She had wagered it would tempt him even now—stories of adventure were carved into his very bones and not even death could change that. “There wasn’t any dramatic reenactment of the fall of Troy, I assure you.”

“An admirable show of _pietas_ nevertheless.” It wasn’t an empty compliment; the structural depth of her personal narrative was impressive on numerous levels.

_Pietas_. Amara sobered at that, for it encompassed all Alison lacked for too many years, all she still struggled to reclaim. Had she reached out to him from loyalty alone? Loyalty to a friend, or to the hallowed _Di Manes_ she honored with so many prayers? The boundaries did not hold.

He was right. She hated Utopia, felt trapped between sea and sky. Yet a home needed a hearth, and she would be their ever-burning flame for as long as they needed her.

“It’s a new start for all of us,” she told him, though she spoke to herself as well. “Remember that. Utopia is not perfect, but it can be ground enough beneath your feet if you let it.”

“To follow your metaphor, that leaves me only in want of a sword.” The words fell from his mouth all wrong, and he thought only of her blood shining bright and red on his hands.

“I will be your sword if you need one,” Amara swore. This wasn’t a pledge she would make lightly. “Are we clear?” [Do not doubt me. You know what my honor is worth.]

“…Yes.”

Doug could read how she chastised herself for past failings by the fall of her shoulders, the slight parting of her lips as she chose her next words with care. [I was not a good friend. I want to be a better one to you.] Her forgiveness alone was enough for him; he didn’t know what to do with all the rest.

“Everyone wants to help, Doug, but honestly I don’t think there’s anything anyone can do for you.” Her tone was soft, yet her eyes cut him with a silent accusation. [You wouldn’t tell us even if there were.]

In her it was pride. In him it was a considerably different character flaw.

“But if you want to get off Utopia for a bit or feel like grabbing a real meal or taking a walk or whatever, anything at all, and you don’t want to do it alone…say the word, okay? Say it’s a bad day. Just two little words and off we’ll go.”

Two little words, but right then even _thank you_ caught in his throat.

He nodded once and hoped she would understand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Latin Notes:  
> The May holiday Amara mentions is the _Lemuralia_ , for appeasing the angry ghosts of the dead. 
> 
> A _gladius_ is a typical Roman sword.
> 
> _Quid...?_ [What...?]  
>  _Num Aquilae lacrimantur?_ [Eagles don't cry, do they?]
> 
> Amara's _Penates_ are images of her household gods, traditionally carried from one's old home to their new one just as Aeneas carried his from Troy. (Her father should have them, but after the which-was-the-brainwashing debacle, it’s very possible Amara has been left as head of her household in terms of religious observance.)
> 
> _Pietas_ is a combination of duty, loyalty, and piety to one's deities, family, and nation. It's a very, very packed word. 
> 
> The _Di Manes_ are spirits of the dead tied to the earth. (Not necessarily angry.)


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Team Supreme spends some time alone together and new boundaries are drawn.

When their ferry pulled up to the pier back on Utopia, Doug immediately spotted the shaggy black pup waiting on the shore. That raggedy dogform could barely hold itself together, fur shot through with jagged golden wire and tattered ears crooked like broken antennae, yet his strikingly half-hearted mimicry did nothing to mask his genuine delight at their return—never had Doug seen a tail wag harder.

Amara followed his gaze and gave a fond little laugh before turning to pay the boatman to send him on his way. Only then did the puppy bound over to greet them, losing cohesion with every step.

“Finally back from your errand, selfriend?” asked Amara. The pup ran a giddy little lap around her, then jumped up with his front paws against her knees and keened adorably in hopes of a pat on the head. Unable to resist, she reached down to scratch behind his stiff ears.

“You’re not a pet, Warlock,” Doug chided, tone too harsh and teasing lilt forgotten.

A hoarse whisper of static. “Apologies.” Warlock’s voice malfunctioned even worse than his form, wavering with uncommon frailty. He ducked his head away from Amara’s teasing fingers and sat at her feet with his tail drooping between his legs. “Self operating on minimal lifeglow and—”

Doug offered his hand without hesitation.

Warlock swayed away, and the light of his eyes dimmed ever so slightly. [I don’t want to take anything from you. I have taken enough.] Frowning, Doug pulled back his arm, but at the last moment Warlock lurched forward into a scrawny little owlform and flapped up to settle on his outstretched wrist. He hardly weighed anything at all, but seemed to have stabilized somewhat in such a compact form, small enough to fit into Doug’s cupped palms. Warlock’s wide, glossy eyes dwarfed his tiny face as they stared at each other in mutual consternation.

Amara cleared her throat. “You two have a nice evening, alright? And don’t forget what I told you, Doug.” She turned to leave, then glanced back over her shoulder. “It’s good to see you again too, ‘Lock. Don’t be a stranger.”

“Self missed you, Selfriendamara!” Warlock chirped. He could go on rambling for hours about how much he really and truly did, yet he held back the affectionate tirade for now—at the moment nothing in all the universe could have made him budge from his chosen perch.

As Warlock watched her go, Doug tucked his arm in closer to his chest and tried to decipher the unnatural poise of that exhausted birdform. For the first few days Warlock had been his constant shadow, yet he took off without a word of explanation and returned now on the verge of dissolution. Amara the kind-hearted, Warlock the mystery — all the familiar pieces more inscrutable than ever.

“You mentioned kelp as your preferred lifeglow resource, correct?”

“Y-yes.” Warlock startled, his feathers ruffling anxiously. “Affirmative.”

Utopia’s craggy shoreline didn’t offer very much for Warlock to feast on: only a few meager streamers of kelp and the odd piece of driftwood dotting the rocky beach. He flitted along from mouthful to mouthful and always kept his back to Doug whenever it came time to convert the material, stubbornly avoiding the obvious association. Funny as it was to watch a tiny owl foraging in the surf and screeching at sudden rogue waves, Doug never cracked a smile, attention fixed so firmly on the way Warlock’s form smoothed out with every devoured discovery, quicker and stronger. After completing the lap, the alien finally managed to pull himself back together into that jagged, skeletal form he’d been sporting. His sharp edges were all curled inward this time.

“Self will stay for high tide,” Warlock said once they ran out of beach, his voice still strained. [I must pull myself together, sorry, sorry.]

“There are other options.” Doug had considered more than a few potential lifeglow harvests —the city was brimming with unwanted organics—but Warlock’s wary hesitation banished them all. “Then we wait,” he concluded, not even giving ‘Lock a chance to explain his reluctance.

Warlock clung to that we like a lifeline, rebuked himself, and guiltily let it go.

They say on one of the boulders along the rocky shore and stared out at the ocean instead of at each other, close but not quite touching. At that time of night the everyday noises of Utopia were drowned out by the constant rumble of the waves. Watching them crest and roll proved equally soothing: no data to wring from endless sensory input. Just Doug and Warlock along with the world, the closest they’d felt to normalcy so far.

Yet Warlock fidgeted and stilled, fidgeted and stilled, not so much indecision as internal war: [I can’t, I must, I won’t.] To Doug it was almost tangible, as though he could reach out and trace a finger along that secret’s razor-sharp edge, catch it in his hands and—what? Peek as it whirled and sliced open his palms? Return it to Warlock so he’d be carved open instead? He could glean nothing more than its existence, its force. Warlock knew that he knew, waited for the decision to be taken from his hands, couldn’t bear to keep secrets but dreaded the telling of it even more. Mutual silence bordering on guilt.

Doug didn’t ask.

Already he intuited so much more than he meant to, behaving like a spy behind friendly lines even more keenly in the aftermath of Selene’s attack. He saw through Warlock’s act from the very start. Around the others he acted as the same old bumbling alien from their youth, but the precision of his every movement betrayed him, and those occasional mix-ups in his speech had not gone unnoticed. His words were more concrete now: careful manipulation, not free-form translation. Uncertainty threaded through his diction and every call of _selfriend_ doubled as a prayer for no one to correct him.

Warlock was something different, trying too hard to be what he thought they wanted. Hoping they wanted him at all. If Doug cared to try at all, he might have felt the same. It was obvious that Warlock, too, had been gone a very long time. And if no one said where or why, if all he dreamed was a return to those ephemeral childhood days, then that was answer enough.

It was easier to study Warlock than to explore the caverns of his own cold heart—easier to read than to write. Doug remembered the words as though they were inked upon his palms, yet the old language would not mesh with the new, and while he could charm the familiar code of the transmode virus back into dormancy, the idiosyncrasies of Warlock’s revised dialect tripped him at every turn.

The key had to be earned, not asked for.

He couldn’t very well demand answers, not when Warlock himself asked nothing, wanted nothing, only orbited around him with endless patience as though waiting for Doug to set a path and give him permission to follow. In this way alone, nothing had changed.

It should have. Two days earlier he had ripped out Warlock’s heart and tossed his broken head into that very sea. Now they sat together harboring cruelties not their own, each unwilling to burden the other.

Around and around, Doug wandered through Warlock’s myriad signs like a labyrinth, considering each sharp and shattered message of the past few days. A devotional. It would be wrong to catalog the others with such careful scrutiny, but nothing was ever off limits between them before. He tiptoed along from clue to clue, mapping locked doors without testing the handles.

It was hard not to wonder. So many years had passed and all their teammates had lives of their own, yet scarcely did Doug awake before Warlock fell into place by his side like it was the only home he’d ever known. A reunion, by definition. Yet the word called to mind that one last glimpse of Warlock’s exuberant grin, that joyous promise so long delayed then gutted of all its heart. His friend’s relief had been a certainty. That relief was long gone now, but the look on that worn and worried face still gave him pause.

Warlock had so little light to him.

While those spindly bones spoke to his weakness, around all who once knew him they formed armor as well, a tacit warning for them to keep their distance, to keep well away from whatever he caged inside him. Doug couldn’t be sure Warlock even realized he was doing it. Yet here alone the cautionary signal was gone, the sharp edges no more. It was the closest Warlock could get to asking.

The waves kept rolling in.

His mind strayed to the construction of metaphors, but none of them were sufficient, none of the words in his head were his own. A field razed to the ground. Two paths: crawl through the mud in search of surviving seeds, or cut losses and let the new weeds grow.

He tried not to think of Illyana. Salted earth. But she handed the sword to Warlock without pause, didn’t she? Her eyes shone not with distrust, not like the others, but with shades of expectation, as though she knew what part he was to play. Definitions of emptiness failed to contain her and no comparison rang true.

Were he punctuated more properly—if he could sleep—perhaps the answers would have come.

“Kitty is dead,” he said suddenly, words nearly lost under the roar of the sea. Doug didn’t want to talk about it, not really, but if he twisted his malaise into a more concrete worry, perhaps it would put Warlock at ease.

All he could feel was the weight of it, the heaviness of loss, and the faintest shame that he did not feel more. He was made of empty spaces. She was one of them. Revision: He was not _made_ of empty spaces, he _was_ an empty space—this is what he saw on his teammates’ faces but did not wish to name.

Warlock stiffened and looked down at him with dawning despair, eyebrows knit together on his gaunt face. He didn’t voice a single one of the questions that flicker across his expression.

Doug expected—not sympathy, no, but nothing like the devastation weaving its way through Warlock’s very core. He had barely ever seen them speak together back in the day; he had no context for the depth of this reaction. “Supposedly,” he added in a hurry, but the damage was already done.

“ _Supposedly?_ ” Warlock echoed feebly.

“I can get you the mission report.” This was not his story to tell, but he pointed up at the starry heavens just the same. “She saved the world, but they lost her out there in space. M.I.A., presumed dead.”

“Lost inequivalent to dead.”

Even _dead_ didn’t really mean dead. Signified drifted from signifier and every sign mutated.

“Self will fetch her,” Warlock continued with absolute conviction, lifeglow shortage be damned.

Doug’s throat went dry. “Impossible. The math is wrong — you won’t ever catch up. They would have saved her if they could.”

These were the wrong words.

Warlock hung his head. Only his eyes offered the slightest glow, casting softly dancing shadows that did nothing to mask the guilt etched along his every inch. Home at last and all that greeted him was heartbreak and the sorrow of helplessness. [I am useless to all of you.]

“Self misses her,” he mumbled sadly a few minutes later.

Silence wasn’t his intent, but Doug could manage little more. His voice failed him.

“And she missed you so very, very much.”

They both knew Warlock wasn’t talking about Kitty anymore. He tilted his face in Doug’s direction, pinned him with a searching gaze and waited for that elusive answer yet again. [What language are you?] He didn’t know; he really didn’t know. It was almost as if—

Doug had misread.

All that time he had assumed it was a request for assurance, or at worst a question of judgment, but no, no. Warlock meant to follow him into whatever language he chose. It wasn’t that he could not ask, merely that he refused to. Secrets and silences, a stalemate of mutually assured isolation. They both waited for cues that never came.

Warlock needed something to ground him, a sign, an anchor from the only person who ever could. His star-charts were blank; he had no constellations to sail by. Lost, adrift, homeless.

No one ever taught Warlock not to build harbors out of dead boys.

“We can miss her together, if you’d like,” Doug said carefully. “She might not even need rescuing—she’s Kitty, after all.”

No smile, no trusting belief greeted this feigned certainty. Warlock merely gave a single nod and stared down at his lap, fingers curling against the rock beneath them as though he didn’t know what to do with his hands.

Tactile languages. Everything crowded in much too close and smothered any desire for touch, but this syntax was _simple_ , and Warlock more familiar than anything else in that new world, including his own face. How easy to lean against Warlock’s warm side, those bones shifting and shaping a more comfortable resting place at once.

A fragile key, but it worked.

Lithe vines of techno-organics traced along Doug’s spine, clinging to him as their trellis while they wove something halfway between a hug and a comfort blanket. Warlock slumped against him inch by inch, tucked his face against that golden hair, and shivered visibly — not failing lifeglow, but the equivalent of a trembling heart.

_I missed you too_ , Doug almost said, tasting the words but finding them lacking. He traced the letters out on Warlock’s leg instead and watched those circuits spring back to life, dancing like a host of giddy fireflies.

Their pieces didn’t fit together anymore, shattered and frayed and reforged all wrong, an imperfect cipher for nameless things. But Warlock held on so tightly that Doug suspected he was trying to fill in the gaps, counting those empty spaces one by one and curling up inside them like he never left, like faith and love could be enough to fix them both.

Doug only wished it were.


End file.
